Conor dug his teeth into his lip. ‘I’ll have to come back to you when I’ve had more time to think. More than anything else, I feel relief that Tom gets to save his oration for another day.’

‘And so say all of us. What happens now? Will you have to stay here for long?’

‘Another few days. What comes after that, I don’t know. A lot depends on how the arm and shoulder recover. I hope I can go back to doing the same job … but it’s too early to say.’

Trouble passed across Conor’s face, and Nina regretted asking the question.

Afterwards, when they’d been herded away by a nurse, the three went for coffee in the cramped hospital cafeteria. It had been a long time since they were together like this. Occasionally, Nina bumped into Tom in Kilmitten. Even more occasionally, she met Tess. She’d never been able to revive their friendship. She told herself that they might have drifted apart anyway. Still, that would have been preferable to years of enforced silence followed by a partial thaw followed by … whatever this was.

Tess was cutting sponge cake into fingers and pouring milk into Tom’s Americano, the tell-tale signs of someone with a relatively young child. Nina had once done the same, but her two girls, Alannah and Bea, were on the cusp of adulthood, and she’d fallen out of practice.

They were surrounded by people in various states of ill-health, a mish-mash of voices pinging off the yellow walls. Even the visitors appeared gaunt, as if being close to so much sickness had stripped them of their vitality. At a corner table, a woman cried quietly. The girl beside her – a daughter, perhaps – looked embarrassed.

This being Dublin, most people cast a quick eye in their direction before looking away again. Admitting that they recognised Tess wouldn’t be cool. Did they recognise Tom? The older ones probably did. With the younger ones, Nina couldn’t be certain. As Alannah frequently pointed out, young people didn’t watch the news. Everything important was online. As far as her elder daughter was concerned, ‘everything’ consisted of make-up lessons and pictures of people following their dream in Bali or living their best life in Koh Samui. In return, she posted sucked-cheek photos of herself to Instagram. ‘In my day,’ Nina had said, ‘an entire year could pass without anyone feeling the need to take your photo. And taking one of yourself would have been weird.’ But Alannah was only twenty-one. Nina was glad that both her daughters were less serious than she had been as a young woman. And she was delighted that being young no longer came with a side order of shame.